John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Stranger with an Octobox: "Appalucci," LaNola Stone's Appalachia

Imagine Appalachia. If you're lucky, you're thinking about mountains -- high enough to reach for the stars, low enough to be forested from hollow to peak. You might know something about the hills' lush summer greens and the stark beauty of winter's bare trees and cottony snow. Or you might... Read more →

"Stranger with a Camera": Death and Documentaries in Appalachia (and What It Has to Do with Africa)

"A camera is like a gun. It's threatening... it's invasive; it is exploitative, in terms of mass media. And it's not always true." --Colin Low, friend and colleague of Hugh O'Connor In 1967, Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor bled to death on a country road in eastern Kentucky. He was in... Read more →

Reuters' Best Best of 2010: Finbarr O'Reilly & South Africa's Poor Whites

The Reuters news agency has just announced its Best of the Year list -- that is, the best of the over 500,000 photos that its photographers made in 2010. (Seems a bit early, but so be it.) One of the images is from Finbarr O'Reilly's superb series on South African... Read more →

Carl Mydans & the Alley Dwellers of Washington, D.C., 1935

My mother was still in high school, when Carl Mydans photographed her neighborhood -- Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. At the time, Mydans was attached to the federal government's Resettlement Administration [RA] and was there to investigate conditions in the city's slums. Talented and ambitious, he would soon leave the... Read more →

Poor Whites & Photography in South Africa: The Backstory

Nanny with Stroller Strikes Terror in Hearts of Millions! Ok, that's a bit of a stretch. But, when Constance Stuart Larrabee made this photo of a black woman looking down at a white man (with revulsion, pity, or some combination of the two), she captured the anxiety that virtually all... Read more →

Convergences, 3: South Africa's Poor Whites & the Color of Poverty

I've been thinking about two remarkably similar photos, one made by Contance Stuart Larrabee, in 1947 or '48, and the other by Finbarr O'Reilly, in 2010. (Scroll down to see them.) They've got me wondering: What is the color of poverty? Ask Americans, and they'll probably tell you that poverty... Read more →

Convergences, 2: Finbarr O'Reilly, Constance Stuart Larrabee, & South Africa's Poor Whites

Africa's exotic species -- giraffes, rhinoceros, mountain gorillas -- have always fascinated outsiders. And none has been more exotic and unexpected, more scandalous and titillating than South Africa's poor whites. After all, wasn't apartheid -- South Africa's particularly vicious system of white supremacy and black subjugation -- supposed to ensure... Read more →